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My thoughts go out to the families affected by the fire early this morning in the Road to Nowhere subdivision. Sadly, the building was destroyed, and there are now approximately 30 families that are homeless.

If you are local and in the position to do so, donations for families affected by the fire will be accepted at Inuksuk High School today and Friday. As you can well imagine, there will be a great need for bedding, towels, small appliances and toys. You can bring these items to the school cafeteria, but please – no large items.

For more information, contact Tina Morrissey, Student Support Teacher at Inuksuk. Tina can be reached by phone at 867-979-5281 ext. 1426, or by fax at 867-979-4380.

Like this:

Sunday ended up being a lazy day for us. We did get some local lurking done thanks to the unseasonably warm weather, but for the most part we didn’t get much further then the boundaries we’ve already been to. We did get a chance to get a peek inside The Source and pick up some batteries for Suzanne’s pump. I’m actually surprised at the selection of wares they have available. Once again I underestimated the resources available here. Unfortunately one unavoidable necessity of life ends up being laundry. We’re limited in what we can wear until the bulk of our clothes arrive with the rest of our stuff so we ended up using the laundry machines here at the Capitol Suites. Sunday has always been D&D day at AC’s for the past few months – meaning Dinner & Dominoes (not the roleplaying game… although at this point I wouldn’t mind that too much either) so it felt kind of vacant as the evening hours rolled around.

We need to corrupt some people as soon as we get a place…

We ended up having a pretty good dinner at The Navigator Inn. I’m loving being in a place where fish is bountiful. Down south if you get something like salmon it’s usually ridiculously expensive. While it may seem idiotic to say that something is “cheap” up here in the land of expensive living, seafood tends to be one of the cheaper items on any menu in town (and in the grocery stores) so I’m a happy camper. Char is the equivalent of salmon up here (I have been properly corrected by our local biologist buddy Missy that char is salmon – just a northern breed) and is plentiful and the shrimp are the size of Mrs. Fields cookies so if you like seafood, you’ll be in heaven. Suzanne had finally succumb to a couple of the local artisans and purchased some rather nice authentic Inuit crafts. It’ll be awesome if we had a place to put them.

Just kidding. She got them as gifts for others. We have a rule. No purchasing stuff for ourselves until we have a place to put it.

After dinner we came back to the hotel to chill. Suzanne is battling a bug that’s trying to creep up on her so taking it easy for the night seemed to be the best course of action. I was happy that my Giants finally won a game so I ended up rounding off my first football watching day in Iqaluit by flipping between the Grey Cup and the Colts/Chargers game. As much as it pains me to say it (being a devout NFL fan and all) the Grey Cup game was far more entertaining than the Sunday Night NFL one. The Walking Dead prevented me from watching most of either game. No they weren’t banging on our windows or anything. Just referring to the TV show. Not that I’m complaining. That show is so engrossing that I, the king of all things football related, doesn’t care about missing games in order to see the new episodes when they debut. Regardless I did catch the end of the Grey Cup game after the show ended. Nice finish. Congrats to the Als for the two-peat.

I guess I kind of gooched myself by saying I wouldn’t be blogging unless I got snowed in or had something remarkable to tell. Suzanne was bad and stayed up late watching crazy Mel Gibson in Edge of Darkness. I caught the beginning but passed out shortly after it started. I think she must have conked out at around 1:30am or so. As luck would have it, we celebrated our first week here with a good old fashioned abrupt wake up call at 2:27am. We were awakened by the very piercing sound of the fire alarm going off in the building. As we scrambled about looking for socks and cats, I thought foolishly to myself “This is a rather odd time to be having a fire drill”. Thank goodness Suzanne had more of a head on her shoulders than I did because she quickly got the Terrible Twosome into their carriers. By the time we got out into the hallway, a couple of other weary guests were just starting to appear from their rooms. Everyone looked confused. We smelled no smoke in the hallway and no one was running for their lives so we calmly made our way to the lobby where we encountered some other guests who were sitting around in various stages of dress. The noise from the alarm was deafening so we made our way to the foyer where it was quieter. Someone needed to let the firemen in when they came because they locked the doors after 10pm so it seemed like a good a place as any to wait. The snow was starting to come down and neither of us (or the kitties) were quite equipped to be outside the building at this point in time unless we absolutely had to.

A pair of fire rescue personnel arrived on the scene in a few minutes. One went upstairs to inspect where the source of the alarm was coming from while the other monitored the board next to where we were waiting. After about 10 -15 minutes they declared it safe to go back to our rooms. Apparently someone had discharged one of the fire extinguishers on the 3rd floor. That was all the information we were able to wrangle from them at the time. To be honest I didn’t care that much so long as it was safe. My head was pounding and I’m sure the cats were a bit rattled by the sudden evacuation so I was just happy to get back to our room. That makes me 3 for 4 with fire alarm situations now. This goes all the way back to when we lived on Waterloo campus at St. Paul’s. I had the privilege of dealing with an evacuation there. I later had a repeat performance when we were living on Vanier drive. I don’t think we every really had to evacuate at Courtland but we set off the smoke alarm there numerous times because we had no exhaust ventilation for the stove so basically whenever you cooked something – anything- it’d go off. I guess it’s just fitting that I kept the pattern alive by having yet another evac in our new stomping ground. I must just be a magnet for this craziness.

Anyway after a wonderful two and a half hours of sleep I found myself walking Suzanne to work once again. I decided to skirt the airport on the way back to the hotel so I snapped some photos along the way. The falling snow, a pair of rather ornery looking dogs and a flock of mutant ravens prevented me from lurking too much. Oh well. I’ll get some more photos eventually.

Please note that there were more photos in this post but thank you WordPress, Internet Explorer and the “Andrea theme” for screwing that up completely. If you would like to view any of the images that were linked to this entry please visit the photobucket dumping ground. Any photos I take of Iqaluit (and any neighboring areas) are originally posted there so if you want to stay up to date just keep checking there every so often. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Did you know that if you have stacks and stacks of paper, that it is almost impossible to burn the entire stack in any reasonable amount of time?

Yeah…neither did I. At least until yesterday, when Ian and I decided that we wouldn’t need anymore shredded paper for packing – and in fact, require none now since the movers will literally come in and pack all of our belongings themselves. So what to do with all the extra papers that we had to shred for confidentiality reasons? No question – Ian, the king of campfires built a small fire pit in the backyard over the summer. I suppose it may have had something to do with the fact that we were both a little jealous of every neighbour in our block having campfires on a weekly basis, despite the fact that I wasn’t sure that it was even allowed in the area. Regardless, no one has every had any issues with the fire department over the small fires on any of the surrounding properties, so we decided that we would carefully and very safely have a small “camp”fire with our private documents. And it was wonderful. But goodness me, if you have lots of paper in your home and are afraid of the fire hazards, just make sure that all the paper is in large piles. This was the slowest fire I’ve ever seen with so much paper. Amazing. I must admit it even felt a little liberating…